The Return of Apple Tax

I think with these announcements Apple is back with a vengeance. Are there some pricey items here? Yes. Are some of these things a little too forward thinking? Yes. Imac is unnecessarily thin. Yes, you should upgrade the memory at Apple prices on your 21 inch to future proof it. Yes you will probably end up buying an external DVD drive and you will probably buy the nice looking one from Apple instead of the blue ray drive from another company that is cheaper. Is Kindle Fire still a great value tablet in the 7 inch range? Yes.

Apple doesn't care. It is back to staking the ground for high end devices. Its stuff is going to cost more. Those Retina Laptops. It expects to sell them and sell them at prices that are easily double what others are selling laptops for. Chromebook at $250? Don't care. Not competing for that market. Bringing the price down on the iPad? Nope not going to do it, just raising the specs and also keep memory size small so that more people pay for memory increase which is Apple's highest margin item.

Yep, there were no bargains announced today. But Apple just announced lots and lots of future profit.

I'm expecting the pricing for the BTO option for a GTX 680MX in the iMac 27 inch is going to get people's attention. But nice to learn that this is indeed the top of the line mobile graphics card or at least close enough that it can plausibly make that claim.

I noticed that no one has mentioned that the iMac 21.5" base model is now $100 (+ tax) more over the previous model. Does the spec bump (and redesign w/o an optical drive) warrant it?

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Yep. And since the ram is not user serviceable, the prudent thing to do is to get the 16 gb version. And you really don't want a 5400 rpm hard drive, so you should probably bump to fusion or at least a 7200 rpm drive.

The average user is going to pay a lot more for this years model than when the 2011 model was introduced.

Apple's one more thing, which Wall Street missed, was they just announced massive new sources of profit because their stuff is going to be much more expensive over the next year than it was in the last year.

Yep. And since the ram is not user serviceable, the prudent thing to do is to get the 16 gb version. And you really don't want a 5400 rpm hard drive, so you should probably bump to fusion or at least a 7200 rpm drive.

The average user is going to pay a lot more for this years model than when the 2011 model was introduced.

Apple's one more thing, which Wall Street missed, was they just announced massive new sources of profit because their stuff is going to be much more expensive over the next year than it was in the last year.

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The fear is that their volume will drop off big. Their volume is already dropping in the face of production issues (iPhone, probably also iPad Mini), Android and possibly Windows competition. Also, alienating the main stream consumer whom they have successfully win back with the iPod/iPhone/iPad also spells disaster to their bottom line, more so than any extra margin will be able to make.

The more one thinks about it, the more this is starting to resemble the Sculley Era. Profitability and product was good for a year or two after Jobs, before they have went to far squeezing their customers' wallets, before the product line vision from Jobs completely vanishes, and everything crumbles.....

I am an AAPL stock owner and just bought 2 iPhone 5 on launch day, so don't call me a Fandroid or anything. I'm just a very concerned AAPL stock owner and Apple supporter....

Hmm, good points Biscotti. This is a wallet squeeze, big time. I just ordered the iPhone 5 (well just as in three weeks ago) and I got the 32 which I know is kind of a rip off. I got the 16 gb iPhone 4 and I didn't want to pay the apple tax for those extra gbs. But I expect to have the phone for two years and I feared the increase in app size. So apple gets $100 more from this customer this cycle.

I think we are going to see higher prices on all the models in practice and once the BTOs. I bet the 2012 version of the 2011 iMac that I got (the one with the best GPU) is going to be much more than what I paid.

But I think this is just going to retard growth in this cycle not reverse it, apple will still capture market share at these prices in 2013. But let's keep an eye on this.

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